Support, social networks and the family in Portugal: two decades of research

Abstract

This article presents two major surveys, carried out in Portugal, on the inclusion of families and individuals in social networks of support and affinity. The first, dating from 1999, sought comprehensively to reconstruct families' social networks by mapping effective support relations. The second survey, fielded in 2009–10, followed a family configuration perspective which sought to reconstruct individuals' networks of close relationships, and the issue of informal support only arose as providing further insight into the characteristics of personal networks. Both surveys will be analysed from a comparative perspective which, while stressing their different but connected conceptual orientations, compares each one's methodological strategies and operationalization procedures. Finally, the main results of each survey are outlined, leading to a brief discussion of the ways in which the two surveys complement each other.

Keywords:

• Portuguese surveys
• family support
• family configurations
• social networks

Notes

1. The master sample is a probabilistic sample based on the Population Census. It is stratified by region (five regions in the mainland, the Azores and Madeira) and has 1143 Census Blocks (each Census Block has about 300 households).

2. The main results summarized here pertain to the sub-sample which is representative of Continental Portugal (N=1776).

3. Overall inter-generational comparison is statistically significant for all the variables in the analysis. Gender differences are of much lesser importance and are significant only among the older generation in the sample.